That dude in the tux stole all of my moves. I swear!
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And, if you're still feeling blue on this particularly gloomy Monday, check out today's Sobremesa entry.
Chris Hedges writes about writing American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. He has interesting things to say about the "theology of despair" and its conclusion that cataclysmic destruction is preferable to this too flawed world.
Via Blog of a Bookslut.
Mark Evanier's News From ME points us to Wednesday's TCM broadcast of Billy Wilder's The Big Carnival. Why should you care? It's about as cynical a meditation on media manipulation as you're likely to see—and it is rarely shown. Paramount hated it (and its floppo status) so much that it deducted its Big Carnival losses from Wilder's Stalag 17 profits.
Read Bruce Bennett's appreciation and set your TiVO.
Sir John has a different take on the composer who said, "I have never understood a measure of music, but I have felt it."
La Cieca at Parterre.com has posted a new podcast episode of "Unnatural Acts of Opera," wherein Elenore Steber performs at the Continental Baths in 1973. The Village Voice's Arthur Bell described the performance as "an affair to rank with the coming of Christ, the death of Garland, the birth of the blues, and the freezing of spinach."
Thank you, La Cieca!
The first time I met PSB's Paul Barton, he mentioned that his love of music had been kindled by, among other things, his father building him a violin when he needed a better instrument in order to become a better player.
Holy crap, I thought to myself, how much work goes into building a violin?
Michael Darnton tells you exactly how much work goes into it—well, into building a viola.
The list of poetry editors with whom I am not familiar is not a short one, but until I read this appreciation of Al Alvarez in The Scotsman, I only knew his name from my tattered copy of The New Poetry—a book that lived on the transmission hump of my 'lime green 69 Plymouth Valiant and got quite a workout as I waited (endlessly) for my waitress girlfriend to get off shift at the IHOP.
My loss, obviously. How could I have ever lived without reading the man who could write lines like this: "There was more life and liveliness and appetite in [Sylvia] Plath writing about death than there is…
I enjoy reading science writer Carl Zimmer and browse his website The Loom frequently. The post I link to below is a great example why.
Zimmer wrote an article for National Geographic on complexity in November 2006, which has lately been the subject of criticism by a biology teacher at Liberty University (Falwell's fundamentalist school in my home town of Lynchburg). Zimmer writes about the experience of reading "such stuff."
" It's as if my words were dragged through some creationist machine and chopped up into...well, into something, although it's hard to quite see what it is…
I was desperately cruising the web looking for a final post for the day when Jon Iverson sent this tea partay.